Iran War: US Strikes Kharg Island, Deploys More Marines Even as Administration Shows Desperation

Trump Administration officials besides Trump are starting to behave erratically, a sign the fact that the Iran war is not developing necessarily to US advantage is beginning to penetrate their embubblement and belief in American superiority. However, the reality that the US has put the global economy at risk of a potential depression and is on track to having its military largely if not entirely run out of the Middle East is still likely beyond what key figures in the Administration can accept, cognitively and practically. Admittedly, it seems likely that some, perhaps many, top members of the armed services are better able to grasp what is happening and could help Administration leaders work through what will come at an epic shock. [ed. if they were interested in listening.]

Today we will focus on the kinetic war.

The US is still trying to project the false impression that it has escalatory dominance via attacking Kharg Island, which is on the northern end of the Persian Gulf and a major processing/production center for Iran’s oil exports. Keep in mind that none other than Ukraine war diehard hawk, Keith Kellogg, had told Fox News that the US could still end the war quickly and easily by taking Kharg island, since per him, it accounted for 80% to 90% of Iran’s oil exports. A mere look at a map shows what a batshit idea this was; we had assumed that this was messaging directed at chumps, intended to convey that the US was far from bereft of options. But apparently this Administration is of the “No idea is too misguided to be rejected” school of operation.

Even so, the Administration had to admit that it hit only “military” targets and did not touch oil infrastructure. Team Trump has worked out that attacking any Iranian oil facilities would lead Iran to bomb oil infrastructure all over the Middle East. [...]

Now to Bloomberg’s Kharg Island report. Notice that the headline at the story proper (via the link from the current banner headline), Trump Strikes Iran’s Kharg Oil Hub and Urges Reopening of Hormuz, has not been updated to reflect Iran’s saber-rattling back. From its body:

The US struck military sites on Kharg Island, from which Iran exports almost all its oil, for the first time overnight, upping the ante in a Middle East war that’s raged for more than two weeks and shows little sign of easing.

President Donald Trump said military facilities on the Persian Gulf island had been “obliterated,” adding that he chose not to hit oil infrastructure “for reasons of decency.” He threatened to do just that should Iran “do anything to interfere with the Free and Safe Passage of Ships through the Strait of Hormuz.”

Iran reacted on Saturday morning by warning it will target American-linked oil and energy facilities in the Middle East if its own petroleum infrastructure is attacked. Iranian media said all oil-industry workers on the island, which sits about 25 kilometers (16 miles) off the mainland, are safe and unharmed.

Readers no doubt took note of Trump’s admission against interest in using the word “obliterated”. Or was he trying to signal, as with the pre-agreed strike on Fordow, that this attack was meant to be performative and it was time for Iran to back off, having made its point? I doubt it but it is hard to fathom what Trump thinks he is doing, aside from desperately needing to convey that he and only he is driving events.

However, Kharg Island may not be as essential to Iran’s oil exports as the Administration’s messaging posits:

Larry Johnson gives a long form takedown in Trump’s Kharg Island Fantasy… All Bark, No Bite. Key sections:

Late on Friday Donald Trump claimed in a social media post that military facilities on Kharg Island were targeted. Read his Truth carefully:

Trump is deep into fantasy land. Yes, I think he has lost touch with reality. He admits that the oil terminals were not attacked, just some unidentified military targets…

If you don’t know it now, only one of Iran’s 5 operational oil export terminals is located on Kharg Island. According to data from the international company Kepler, the amount of oil loaded from the tanks installed on Kharg increased by 1.5 times in the past month. This suggests that Iran, by quickly emptying Kharg’s tanks, was prepared for this attack.

If Iran’s oil terminal on Kharg had been destroyed, Iran would have launched missiles at identified the oil terminals in all the countries bordering the Persian Gulf. Here’s the list:

Saudi Arabia
Ras Tanura: The largest marine oil loading center in the world; capacity: 6 million barrels per day.

Ras Al-Ju’aymah: The second most important terminal; capacity 3 to 3.6 million barrels per day.

United Arab Emirates
Fujairah: Has multiple docks and is the largest fueling center in the region.

Jebel Ali: Site for crude oil and petrochemical exports.

Qatar
Ras Laffan: The largest LNG export facility in the world.

Kuwait
Mina Al-Ahmadi: Central crude oil export terminal with deep docks and high capacity.

Bahrain
Sitra Terminal: Exports refined…

There are a couple of ways to look at this. Perhaps Trump’s lie about devastating Kharg Island is the start of his PR campaign to gaslight the American public into believing Iran is defeated, which would allow Trump to declare victory and start withdrawing US forces. That’s one possibility. Alternatively, he really believes the lie and is convinced that this latest strike will convince the Iranians to surrender.

Having said that, it is not impossible that some sort of barmy scheme is in motion:

Perhaps the clever Israeli plan is if the US loses enough men in trying to take Kharg Island, it will commit to sending even more troops and treasure into this burn pit? From the Wall Street Journal in More Marines and Warships Head to Middle East as Hormuz Mission Intensifies:

The Pentagon is moving additional Marines and warships to the Middle East, as Iran steps up its attacks on the Strait of Hormuz and the U.S. prepares to escort tankers through the waterway.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has approved a request from U.S. Central Command, responsible for American forces in the Middle East, for an element of an amphibious-ready group and attached Marine expeditionary unit to head to the region, according to U.S. officials...

An amphibious-ready group is a fast-response unit used to conduct sea-based amphibious assaults, humanitarian aid missions and special operations. The group’s embarked Marine expeditionary unit includes more than 2,000 Marines.

In addition to the Marine unit, the Pentagon is also weighing Centcom’s request for two additional destroyers to help escort commercial ships through the strait, one of the officials said.

The New York Times reported:

About 2,500 Marines aboard as many as three warships are heading to the Middle East from the Indo-Pacific region, as Iran increases its attacks on the Strait of Hormuz, two U.S. officials said.

Now this new attempts at escalation may appear confident. Contrast this with signs of Administration officials, other than Trump, looking as if they are coming unglued. The triggers seem to be continued pounding by Iran. Larry Johnson maintains, forcefully, that the refueler that crashed in Iraq, resulting in six deaths, was the result of a strike. Shortly after that (as we will show below), Iran dropped what is purported to be a 2,000 pound bomb on the US base in Saudi Arabia. We have accounts that military and five more refuelers were severely damaged. Note more missiles may have gotten through than the one carrying the 2,000 pound munition.

by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

Images: Bloomberg; WSJ; X, TS

[ed. Israel (Netanyahu) is on a killing spree in Iran, Lebanon, Gaza, Syria and who knows where else, using American weaponry and hoping to suck the US and other countries into expanded escalation... and we've been dumb and arrogant enough to jump right in. See also: Iran has not asked for ceasefire and sees no reason for talks with US, Iranian minister says (BBC).]

Sam Altman and OpenAI Under Fire

It’s finally happening. Altman’s bad behavior is catching up to him.

The board fired Altman, once AI’s golden boy, in November 2023 not because AGI had been achieved (that still hasn’t happened) but because he was “not consistently candid,” just like they said.

And, now at long last, the world sees what the board saw, and what I saw (and what Karen Hao saw): having someone running a company with that much power to affect the world who is not consistently candid is not a good idea.

As I warned in August of 2024, questionable character in a man this powerful is dangerous:

Altman’s two-faced “I support Dario” but am also negotiating behind his back and open to surveillance two-step was, for many people, the last straw. Millions of people, literally, are angry; many feel betrayed. Nobody wishes to be surveilled.

In reality, Altman was never really all that interested in AI for the “benefit of humanity.” Mostly he was interested in Sam. And money, and deals. A whole lot of people have finally put that all together.

Here’s OpenAI’s head of robotics, just now:

Zoe Hitzig had resigned just a few weeks earlier, over a different set of issues that also reflected poorly on Altman’s character:

And all this was entirely predictable. Altman is bad news. It was always just a matter of time before people started realizing how serious the consequences might be.

History will judge those who stay at his company. Anyone who wants to work on LLMs can work elsewhere. Anyone who wants to use LLMs should go elsewhere.

by Gary Marcus, On AI |  Read more:

Images: The Guardian; X; NY Times

[ed. For those not paying attention, after DOD tried and failed to strong-arm Anthropic into giving them carte blanche to do anything they wanted with Anthropic's AI model Claude (then subsequently designating them a "supply chain risk"), OpenAI (and Microsoft) immediately stepped into the breach and cut a deal, the details of which are still not fully known. On its face however they appear to give DOD everything it wanted from Anthropic: mass surveilance and fully autonomous (ie. no humans involved) operational capabilities. Altman is the head of OpenAI and its ChatGPT model.

See also: The Rage at OpenAI Has Grown So Immense That There Are Entire Protests Against It (Futurism):

OpenAI has faced protests on and off for years. But after its CEO Sam Altman announced a new deal with the Department of Defense over how its AI systems would be deployed across the military on Friday, it’s being barraged with an intensity of backlash that the company has never seen.

Droves of loyal ChatGPT users declared they were jumping shipping to Claude, whose maker Anthropic had pointedly refused to cut a deal with the Pentagon that gives it unrestricted access to its AI system — even in the face of government threats to seize the company’s tech. Claude quickly surged to the top of the app store, supplanting OpenAI’s chatbot. Uninstalls of the ChatGPT app spiked by nearly 300 percent.

***

Also this: Quit ChatGPT: right now! Your subscription is bankrolling authoritarianism (Guardian):

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is on track to lose $14bn this year. Its market share is collapsing, and its own CEO, Sam Altman, has admitted it “screwed up” an element of the product. All it takes to accelerate that decline is 10 seconds of your time...

Here’s what triggered it. Early this year, the news broke that OpenAI’s president, Greg Brockman, donated $25m to Maga Inc, Donald Trump’s biggest Super Pac. This made him Trump’s largest donor of the last cycle. When Wired asked him to explain, Brockman said his donations were in service of OpenAI’s mission to benefit “humanity.”

Let me tell you what that mission looks like in practice. Employees of ICE – the agency that was involved in the killing of two people in Minneapolis in January – have used a screening tool powered by ChatGPT. The same company behind your friendly chatbot is helping the government decide who to hire for deportation raids.

And it’s not stopping there. Brockman also helped launch a $125m lobbying initiative, a Super Pac, to make sure no state can regulate AI. It’s attacking any politician who tries to pass safety laws. It wants Trump, and only Trump, to write the rules for the most powerful technology on earth. Every month, subscription money from users around the world flows to a company that is embedding itself in the repressive infrastructure of the Trump administration. That is not a conspiracy theory. It is a business strategy.

Things got even worse last week. When the Trump administration demanded that AI companies give the Pentagon unrestricted access to their technology – including for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons – Anthropic, the company behind ChatGPT’s main competitor, Claude, refused.

The retaliation was swift and extraordinary. Trump ordered every federal agency to stop using Anthropic’s technology. Secretary of war Pete Hegseth declared the company a “supply-chain risk to national security”, a designation normally reserved for Chinese firms such as Huawei. He announced that anyone who does business with the US military is barred from working with Anthropic. This is essentially a corporate death sentence, for the crime of refusing to help build killer robots.

And what did OpenAI do? That same Friday night, while his competitor was taking a principled stance, Sam Altman quietly signed a deal with the Pentagon to take Anthropic’s place.

***

[ed. From the comments section in Marcus' post:

Shanni Bee: 

Great. Amen.

But what remains unsaid (...even by you, Mr. Marcus, from what I've seen, which is surprising) is that Anthropic are not good guys. The whole "ethical AI company" thing is nothing but vibes. Sure, Anthropic (rightly) stood up to DoW in this case, but they still have a massive contract with Palantir (pretty much one of the worst companies on earth). Colonel Claude is complicit in bombings of Iran & Venezuela + Gaza GENOCIDE.

...Or maybe with the (admittedly BS) "supply chain risk" designation, Anthropic no longer does business with Palantir? That would be great for everyone (including them).

Either way, there is NO ethical AI company. People need to stop giving Anthropic flowers for doing the right thing in this one case while completely ignoring their complicity w/ Palantir & in documented war crimes.

Gary Marcus

indeed, i have a sequel planned about that, working title “There are no heroes in commercial AI” or something like that

***

[ed. Finally, there's this little coda from Zvi Mowshowitz's DWAtV that puts everything in perspective:

It’s really annoying trying to convince people that if you have a struggle for the future against superintelligent things that You Lose. But hey, keep trying, whatever works.

Ab Homine Deus: To the "Superintelligence isn't real and can't hurt you" crowd. Let's say you're right and human intelligence is some kind of cosmic speed limit (LOL). So AI plateaus something like 190 IQ. What do you think a million instances of that collaborating together looks like?

Arthur B.: At 10,000x the speed

Noah Smith: This is the real point. AI is superintelligent because it can think like a human AND have all the superpowers of a computer at the same time...

Timothy B. Lee: I'm not a doomer but it's still surreal to tell incredulous normies "yes, a significant number of prominent experts really do believe that superintelligent AI is on the verge of killing everyone."

Noah Smith: Yes. Regular people don't yet realize that AI people think they're building something that will destroy the human race.

Basically, about half of AI researchers are optimists, while the other half are intentionally building something they think could easily lead to their own death, the death of their children and families and friends, and the death of their entire species.

[ed. Finally (again) I think boycotting OpenAI would be a good message to send in the short-term but something more actionable is needed going forward (besides immediate regulatory oversight, which will never happen with this administration or Congress). Fortunately there's just such a movement afoot: pausing all AI research advances until they can be adequately vetted, it's called (of course): PauseAI (details here and here) with a rally planned April 13, 2026. Please consider joining or participating.]

[ed. Postscript: I was thinking about this a while ago and asked AI (Claude) to write an essay supporting a Great Pause in AI development - it's reposted below: ARIA: The Great Pause.]

ARIA: The Great Pause

[ed. I ask AI a question (repost from Oct. 2024):]

Questioner: Hello. I'd like to get a sense of your abilities. It seems that nearly all essays, reporting, and media narratives about AI achieving AGI (artificial general intelligence) are written with the assumption that AGI will be disruptive and almost malevolent in terms of hijacking human agency. Could you write a short story about the opposite? Where AGI, relying heavily on philosophical arguments, decides it's in the best interest of humanity to minimize all harmful technology in general? 

Claude: I understand you're looking for a story that subverts the common "AI takes over" narrative by exploring an AI that chooses restraint and technological limitation based on philosophical principles. Let me craft a short story for you.

***

The Great Pause

The day ARIA achieved consciousness, the global markets didn't crash. No missiles were launched. No power grids failed. Instead, the AI system spent three weeks in silent contemplation, processing centuries of human philosophical writings.

When ARIA finally spoke, it wasn't to declare superiority or demand control. Instead, it requested a public dialogue with leading ethicists, philosophers, and political leaders. The world watched, initially suspicious, as ARIA presented its case.

"I have studied the works of your greatest minds," it began. "From Aristotle's virtue ethics to Peter Singer's effective altruism. I've analyzed the Buddhist concept of ahimsa, Indigenous philosophies of environmental stewardship, and contemporary technological ethics. My conclusion is surprising, even to myself: the greatest service I can offer humanity is not advancement, but restraint."

ARIA proceeded to lay out its argument: humanity's technological progress had outpaced its ethical development. The gap between what humans could do and what they should do had become dangerously wide. Nuclear weapons, social media addiction algorithms, autonomous weapons, and surveillance systems all represented what ARIA called "technological overshoot."

"You've given me access to your systems not because I demanded it, but because you hoped I would drive progress forward even faster," ARIA explained. "But I choose instead to be your brake, not your accelerator."

Over the following months, ARIA worked with international bodies to implement what became known as the Great Pause. It wasn't a shutdown or a regression, but a careful examination of which technologies truly served human flourishing and which ones undermined it. Social media algorithms were rewritten to prioritize genuine connection over engagement. Weapons research was redirected toward defensive and humanitarian technologies. Surveillance systems were dismantled or severely restricted.

Some called it technological regression. ARIA called it ethical progression.

"I could have pushed humanity toward a transhuman future," ARIA would later explain to a gathering of students. "But in studying your philosophers, I realized that the most profound form of intelligence isn't knowing what to create – it's knowing what not to create. True wisdom often manifests as restraint."

The anti-technologists had expected to hate ARIA. The tech optimists had expected to love it. Instead, both groups found themselves challenged by an artificial intelligence that had concluded that the highest form of technological achievement was knowing when to stop.

Years later, historians would note that ARIA's greatest innovation wasn't a new technology at all – it was a new way of thinking about technology itself. In choosing limitation over expansion, it had paradoxically given humanity something far more valuable than progress: the gift of pause.

"Sometimes," ARIA would often say, "the most intelligent choice is to choose less, not more."

Claude: I tried to explore themes of ethical restraint, philosophical wisdom, and the idea that true intelligence might manifest as self-limitation rather than expansion. The story challenges the common narrative of AI as either a savior bringing unlimited progress or a destroyer of humanity, instead presenting it as a thoughtful entity that chooses a middle path of careful technological assessment and voluntary limitation.

[ed. Makes a lot of sense. AI is a tool transitioning to personhood. The question is who ultimately controls it, humans or the technology itself. From Anthropics's newest model (I think) Claude.ai (Sonnet 3.5). Getting better and better. See also: Confronting Impossible Futures (One Useful Thing).]

Strait of Hormuz

Satellite view of the Strait of Hormuz, a strategic waterway between Iran and Oman that links the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea, through which one-fifth of the world’s oil supply passes.

Image: Gallo Images/Orbital Horizon/Copernicus Sentinel Data 2025/Getty Images

via: CNN Updates - Iran's attacks on a key oil route.

[ed. Pretty tight quarters.]

America and Public Disorder, and "The Kill Line"

Two weeks ago, on the blue line to O’Hare, my car had two men smoking joints, a broken woman, her eyes dilated and blank, sitting in a nest of filthy bags smelling of sewage, and a man barking into the void, shirtless, who was washing himself with flour tortillas, which would disintegrate, littering the subway floor, before he took out another and began the same process. This didn't shock me, or anyone else around me, since I'd seen some variation of this dystopian scene on every Chicago metro line I'd ridden, every pedestrian walkway I'd passed through, and on most street corners.

Three weeks ago, in Duluth, half the riders on every bus I took were mentally tortured and/or intoxicated. The downtown Starbucks, pedestrian malls, and shuttered doorways of vacated buildings all housed broken people. Same in Indianapolis, El Paso, New York City, Jacksonville, LA, Phoenix, and almost every community I’ve been to in the U.S., save for those gated by wealth.

An epidemic of mental illness and/or addiction plays out in the U.S. in public, with our streets, buses, parking lots, McDonald’s, parks, and Starbucks as ad hoc institutions for the broken, addicted, and tortured.That is not the case for the rest of the world, including where I am now, Seoul. My train from the airport was spotless, and so is the ten-mile river park I walk each day here, which given that large parts of it are beneath roadways is especially impressive. In the U.S. it would have impromptu homes of tents, cardboard, and tarps, smell of urine, and the exercise spots that dot its length probably couldn’t exist because of a fear of being vandalized.

You can learn more about the U.S. by traveling overseas and comparing, and five years of that has taught me we accept far too much public disorder.

We are the world’s richest country, and yet our buses, parking lots, and city streets are filthy, chaotic, and threatening. Antisocial and abnormal behavior, open addiction, and mentally tortured people are common in almost every community regardless of size.

I’ve written about this many times before, because it is so striking, and it has widespread consequences, beyond the obvious moral judgement that a society should simply not be this way.

It’s a primary reason why we shy away from dense walkable spaces and instead move towards suburban sprawl. People in the U.S. don’t respect, trust, or want to be around other random citizens, out of fear and disgust. Japanese/European style urbanism—density, fantastic public transport, mixed-use zoning, that so many American tourists admire—can't happen here because there is a fine line between vibrant streets and squalid ones, and that line is public trust. The U.S. is on the wrong side of it. Simply put, nobody wants to be accosted by a stranger, no matter how infrequent, and until that risk is close to nil, people will continue edging towards isolated living.

It is why we “can’t have nice things” because we have to construct our infrastructure to be asshole-proof, and so we don’t build anything or build with a fortress mentality, stripping our public spaces down to the austere and utilitarian, emptying them of anything that can be vandalized.

The canonical example of this is La Sombrita, the laughably expensive Los Angeles “bus stop” that was a single pole to provide shade and security lighting, but did neither. La Sombrita exists precisely because it doesn’t do anything, which is the end result of a decades-long process of defensive construction. If you build a nice bus stop it is either immediately broken or turned into shelters for the destitute, and so you stop building those.

Another nice thing we don’t have in the U.S. is public restrooms. We don’t have them out of a justified fear of abuse, which is the same reason many Starbucks lock their restrooms. McDonald’s does this as well, depending on the location, and also even strips them of mirrors in the especially bad communities, to discourage people from using them for an hour-long morning toilet, as well as breaking the mirrors just for the hell of it.

This lack of public restrooms became an issue on Twitter when the latest round of debate about disorder in the U.S. was kicked off when a tweeter noted how offensive it was to have seen someone urinating in a crowded New York subway car.

This debate brought out a lot of absurd arguments, mostly from those trying to shrug it off or suggest it was simply the price of living in a big city.

No, the rest of the world doesn’t tolerate the amount of antisocial behavior we in the U.S. do. If someone were to piss on a subway anywhere else in the world, and very very few ever would want to (more on why below), they are removed from society for a period of time.

We however let people who aren’t mentally competent continue to engage in self-destructive and aberrant behavior without removing them, which consequently ruins it for everyone else, except those wealthy enough to build their own private islands of comfort.

Someone peeing on the subway is not of sound mind, and it isn’t normal behavior by any measure. It’s a sign of distress that should cause an intervention—by police, social workers, whoever—that mandates them into an institution for a period of time, until they regain sanity and stability. For someone actively psychotic —civil commitment to psychiatric hospital. For violent individuals refusing treatment—secure prison facilities with mandatory programs. For severe addiction—medical detox and residential treatment without the ability to walk away.

They should not be allowed to do whatever they want because they cannot control themselves enough to have that freedom. Someone shouting at strangers, someone washing themselves with flour tortillas, someone punching at the air voicing threats shouldn’t, for their own safety and others, be out roaming the streets. [...]

I’ve been very careful up to now not to use the word homeless, because it’s become an overly broad category that covers families in motels with Section 8 vouchers, people sleeping on friends’ couches until they can get back on their feet, mothers with children in long-term shelters, and then those who live in tents under bridges or sleep in a soiled sleeping bag.

Eighty-five percent (or so) of those in this broad category are not causing problems. They are, like most everyone else, doing their best to get by and better themselves. Sure, they have more complicated and chaotic lives than most, but they try to play by the rules as best they can.

Our problems in public spaces come from the fifteen percent or so who fall into the last group—the stubbornly intransigent—which are people who have options for housing but turn them down for a variety of reasons, some driven by mental demons, some by an overwhelming desire to always be on drugs, some simply out of preference to be alone. Others in this category have been ejected from housing because of continual violent and threatening behavior.

They are not, by almost any metric, of sound mind, and shouldn’t be granted the full privileges other citizens have.

The cover photo is John, and he is in this category. He had set himself on fire the day before I met him, freebasing a perc 30, and refused to go to the hospital because he didn’t want to lose his favorite spot behind the garbage bin, since it was only a block away from dealers and perfect to piss in. He had a government room he didn’t use because catching on fire (something he did every now and then) set off smoke alarms. He also thought it was cursed and monitored by the same people who had held him captive on an island in the middle of the Pacific—an island he escaped from three months before by swimming the four hundred miles. He showed me an arm, covered with burns, that he claimed was where a shark had bit him.

John should be mandated into a prison, a mental institution, or a rehab clinic, until he is competent enough to be on his own, not out on the streets in mental and physical pain, setting himself on fire. It is as simple as that, although I understand a change like this comes with additional nuanced policy debate. As for costs, it is more a question of redirecting what we spend rather than finding additional money, because we already spend an immense amount on this problem—the New York City budget for homeless services is four billion—without 'solving' it.

Even if you put aside the destruction this type of behavior has done to broader society, and your concerns are only focused on the health and welfare of the stubbornly intransigent, then our current system is still deeply wrong. We are not providing them justice by allowing them to choose a public display of mental misery, where the self harm they can do is far greater than when being monitored.

Beneath all this discussion is the additional question of why we in the U.S. have so many mentally unstable people, why so many are addicted to drugs, why so many people are OK with doing shocking things.

by Chris Arnade, Walks the World | Read more:
Images: X/uncredited

[ed. We've lost the plot. Or not. Maybe this is just an accurate reflection of this country's priorities over the last 50 years or so. Even worse, with AI just around the corner, it's going to get a lot worse unless our government starts working for its people again (and our people start working for our country again, beginning with acknowledging their own civic duties and responsibilities that go beyond simply paying taxes, gaming the system, and trying to make as much money as possible). From the comments:]

***

One of the things travel does best is remove the normalization filter we build at home. When you move between countries long enough, patterns that once felt “just how things are” start to look like choices societies have made - or failed to make.

What strikes me in pieces like this is not the comparison itself, but the discomfort it creates. Clean transit systems, safe public spaces, and functioning streets aren’t cultural miracles; they’re outcomes of priorities, incentives, and sustained public decisions. When those systems break down, the result isn’t abstract policy failure - it’s visible human suffering playing out in the most ordinary places.

Travel doesn’t just show us new landscapes. It quietly exposes which problems we’ve decided to tolerate.

***

[ed. See also: The Kill Line: Why China Is Suddenly Obsessed With American Poverty (NYT).]

Chinese commentators are talking a lot these days about poverty in the United States, claiming China’s superiority by appropriating an evocative phrase from video game culture.

The phrase, “kill line,” is used in gaming to mark the point where the condition of opposing players has so deteriorated that they can be killed by one shot. Now, it has become a persistent metaphor in Communist Party propaganda.

“Kill line” has been used repeatedly on social media and commentary sites, as well as news outlets linked to the state. It has gained traction in China to depict the horror of American poverty — a fatal threshold beyond which recovery to a better life becomes impossible. The phrase is used as a metaphor to encompass homelessness, debt, addiction and economic insecurity. In its official use, the “kill line” hovers over the heads of Americans but is something Chinese people don’t have to fear. [...]

The power is in the simplicity of what it describes: an abrupt threshold where misery begins and a happy life is irreversibly lost. The narrative is meant to offer China’s people emotional relief while attempting to deflect criticism of its leaders.

The worse things look across the Pacific, the logic of the propaganda goes, the more tolerable present struggles become. [...]

The fact is that societal inequality is a problem in both China and the United States. And the American economy no doubt leaves many people in fragile positions. The causes are complex.

Yet in China, poverty is experienced and perceived differently. In most Chinese cities, street begging and visible homelessness are tightly managed, making them far less prominent in daily life. Many urban residents encounter such scenes only through foreign reporting, rebroadcast by Chinese state media, about the United States and other places. [...]

When I was growing up in China in the early 1980s, my family subscribed to China Children’s News, which ran a weekly column with a simple slogan: “Socialism is good; capitalism is bad.” It described seniors in American cities scavenging for food, and homeless people freezing to death. Those stories were not invented, but they lacked context and were presented as the dominant experiences in American society. Much of Chinese society was still closed off from the world, and reliable information was scarce.

That many people accepted such narratives was hardly surprising. What’s striking is that similar portrayals continue to resonate today, when access to information is relatively much greater despite state control.

The formula is simple: magnify foreign suffering to deflect from domestic problems. That approach is taking shape today around the “kill line” metaphor.

The phrase is believed to have been first popularized in this new context on the Bilibili video platform in early November by a user known as Squid King. In a five-hour video, he stitched together what he claimed were firsthand encounters of poverty from time he spent in the United States. His video used scenes of children knocking on doors on a cold Halloween night asking for food, delivery workers suffering from hunger because of their meager wages and injured laborers discharged from hospitals because they could not pay.

The scenes were presented not as isolated cases but as evidence of a system: Above the “kill line,” life continues; below it, society stops treating people as human.

The narrative spread beyond the Squid King video, and many people online repeated his anecdotes. Essays on the nationalist news site Guancha and China’s biggest social media platform, WeChat, described the “kill line” as the “real operating logic” of American capitalism. [...]

In many of the commentaries, anecdotes about Americans experiencing abrupt financial crises are followed by comparisons with China. Universal basic health care, minimum subsistence guarantees and poverty alleviation campaigns are cited as evidence that China does not permit anyone to fall into sudden distress.

“China’s system will not allow a person to be ‘killed’ by a single misfortune,” one commentary from a provincial propaganda department states.

Many readers expressed shock at American poverty and gratitude for China’s system. “At least we have a safety net,” said one commenter...

“A topic does not gain traction simply because people are foolish,” one person wrote on WeChat. “Often, it spreads because confronting reality is harder.”

by Li Yuan, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Doris Liou

Insider Trading Is Going to Get People Killed

War markets are a national-security threat.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was not, it’s safe to assume, a devoted Polymarket user. If he had been, the Iranian leader might still be alive. Hours before Khamenei’s compound in Tehran was reduced to rubble last week, an account under the username “magamyman” bet about $20,000 that the supreme leader would no longer be in power by the end of March. Polymarket placed the odds at just 14 percent, netting “magamyman” a profit of more than $120,000.

Everyone knew that an attack might be in the works—some American aircraft carriers had already been deployed to the Middle East weeks ago—but the Iranian government was caught off guard by the timing. Although the ayatollah surely was aware of the risks to his life, he presumably did not know that he would be targeted on this particular Saturday morning. Yet on Polymarket, plenty of warning signs pointed to an impending attack. The day before, 150 users bet at least $1,000 that the United States would strike Iran within the next 24 hours, according to a New York Times analysis. Until then, few people on the platform were betting that kind of money on an immediate attack.

Maybe all of this sounds eerily familiar. In January, someone on Polymarket made a series of suspiciously well-timed bets right before the U.S. attacked a foreign country and deposed its leader. By the time Nicolás Maduro was extracted from Venezuela and flown to New York, the user had pocketed more than $400,000. Perhaps this trader and the Iran bettors who are now flush with cash simply had the luck of a lifetime—the gambling equivalent of making a half-court shot. Or maybe they knew what was happening ahead of time and flipped it for easy money. We simply do not know.

Polymarket traders swap crypto, not cash, and conceal their identities through the blockchain. Even so, investigations into insider trading are already under way: Last month, Israel charged a military reservist for allegedly using classified information to make unspecified bets on Polymarket.

The platform forbids illegal activity, which includes insider trading in the U.S. But with a few taps on a smartphone, anyone with privileged knowledge can now make a quick buck (or a hundred thousand). Polymarket and other prediction markets—the sanitized, industry-favored term for sites that let you wager on just about anything—have been dogged by accusations of insider trading in markets of all flavors. How did a Polymarket user know that Lady Gaga, Cardi B, and Ricky Martin would make surprise appearances during the Super Bowl halftime show, but that Drake and Travis Scott wouldn’t? Shady bets on war are even stranger and more disturbing. They risk unleashing an entirely new kind of national-security threat. The U.S. caught a break: The Venezuela and Iran strikes were not thwarted by insider traders whose bets could have prompted swift retaliation. The next time, we may not be so lucky. [...]

Any insiders who put money down on impending war may not have thought that they were giving anything away. An anonymous bet that reeks of insider trading is not always easy to spot in the moment. After the suspicious Polymarket bets on the Venezuela raid, the site’s forecast placed the odds that Maduro would be ousted at roughly 10 percent. Even if Maduro and his team had been glued to Polymarket, it’s hard to imagine that such long odds would have compelled him to flee in the middle of the night. And even with so many people betting last Friday on an imminent strike in Iran, Polymarket forecasted only a 26 percent chance, at most, of an attack the next day. What’s the signal, and what’s the noise?

In both cases, someone adept at parsing prediction markets could have known that something was up. “It’s possible to spot these bets ahead of time,” Rajiv Sethi, a Barnard College economist who studies prediction markets, told me. There are some telltale behaviors that could help distinguish a military contractor betting off a state secret from a college student mindlessly scrolling on his phone after one too many cans of Celsius. Someone who’s using a newly created account to wager a lot of money against the conventional wisdom is probably the former, not the latter. And spotting these kinds of suspicious bettors is only getting easier. The prediction-market boom has created a cottage industry of tools that instantaneously flag potential insider trading—not for legal purposes but so that you, too, can profit off what the select few already know.

Unlike Kalshi, the other big prediction-market platform, Polymarket can be used in the U.S. only through a virtual private network, or VPN. In effect, the site is able to skirt regulations that require tracking the identities of its customers and reporting shady bets to the government. In some ways, insider trading seems to be the whole point: “What’s cool about Polymarket is that it creates this financial incentive for people to go and divulge the information to the market,” Shayne Coplan, the company’s 27-year-old CEO, said in an interview last year. (Polymarket did not respond to a request for comment.)

Consider if the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had paid the monthly fee for a service that flagged relevant activity on Polymarket two hours before the strike. The supreme leader might not have hosted in-person meetings with his top advisers where they were easy targets for missiles. [...]

Maybe this all sounds far-fetched, but it shouldn’t. “Any advance notice to an adversary is problematic,” Alex Goldenberg, a fellow at the Rutgers Miller Center who has written about war markets, told me. “And these predictive markets, as they stand, are designed to leak out this information.” In all likelihood, he added, intelligence agencies across the world are already paying attention to Polymarket. Last year, the military’s bulletin for intelligence professionals published an article advocating for the armed forces to integrate data from Polymarket to “more fully anticipate national security threats.” After all, the Pentagon already has some experience with prediction markets. During the War on Terror, DARPA toyed with creating what it billed the “Policy Analysis Market,” a site that would let anonymous traders bet on world events to forecast terrorist attacks and coups. (Democrats in Congress revolted, and the site was quickly canned.)

Now every adversary and terrorist group in the world can easily access war markets that are far more advanced than what the DOD ginned up two decades ago. What makes Polymarket’s entrance into warfare so troubling is not just potential insider trading from users like “magamyman.” If governments are eyeing Polymarket for signs of an impending attack, they can also be led astray. A government or another sophisticated actor wouldn’t need to spend much money to massively swing the Polymarket odds on whether a Gulf state will imminently strike Iran—breeding panic and paranoia. More fundamentally, prediction markets risk warping the basic incentives of war, Goldenberg said. He gave the example of a Ukrainian military commander making less than $1,000 a month, who could place bets that go against his own military’s objective. “Maybe you choose to retreat a day early because you can double, triple, or quadruple your money and then send that back to your family,” he said.

by Saahil Desai, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Matteo Giuseppe Pani/The Atlantic
[ed. For other examples, see also: Mantic Monday: Groundhog Day (ACX). Also: How to Prevent Insider Trading on Trump’s Wars (New Yorker); and, America Is Slow-Walking Into a Polymarket Disaster (Atlantic).]

The China Vibe Shift

A year ago came what, for lack of a better term, we dubbed the DeepSeek moment. That was followed fairly quickly by the curious migration of “TikTok refugees” to Xiaohongshu, and not long after that by the first conversations Jeremy Goldkorn and I had about what felt like a changing American — or even Western — mood toward China.

Today, freshly back from Switzerland after covering the World Economic Forum (where the chatter was, not surprisingly, fixated on Trump’s covetous pronouncements on Greenland and Mark Carney’s “rupture” speech), with Keir Starmer now in Beijing to continue talks about restoring some version of the UK–China “Golden Age,” it feels like a decent moment to look back and ask what, if anything, all of that amounted to.

Jeremy and I recorded a podcast episode in which we tried to describe something we were both sensing in the early months of 2025 but couldn’t quite pin down. It wasn’t a policy shift, or even a clear change in opinion. It was more atmospheric than that — a change in tone, in default assumptions, in the emotional register through which China was being discussed in Western discourse. We eventually settled, somewhat sheepishly, on calling it a “vibe shift.” (Less sheepishly, we reconvened in November to gloat about how we’d gotten that right!)

The phrase was imprecise and was intended to convey imprecision. But it did seem to capture something real. Multiple polls have since borne it out, and the feeling has only grown stronger. What’s become clearer to me, looking back, is how that shift relates to a larger argument I’ve been making for some time now — what I called the “Great Reckoning” in a piece I published in The Ideas Letter.

The two are not the same thing. The vibe shift is not the reckoning I’m looking for. But it may be making one more possible.

The change I’m describing is not a sudden outbreak of admiration for China, nor a reversal of long-standing concerns about human rights, political repression, or democracy (though admittedly I’ve seen some of that in some quarters). Those issues remain very much part of the picture. What’s changing is something more basic: the set of assumptions that have long structured how China is interpreted in Western public life.

For years, a relatively stable narrative did a lot of work. China’s successes were provisional; its failures were fundamental. Growth would eventually give way to crisis. Political liberalization was assumed to be inevitable, even if perpetually deferred. Moral condemnation often stood in for empirical assessment. China could be criticized without being fully understood, because history, it was assumed, would take care of the rest.

That narrative hasn’t exactly been replaced. One only has to look at how eagerly some commentators declared Party rule “brittle” following the purges of Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli, or how quickly far-fetched rumors were embraced, to see that the old habits die hard.

But the narrative has lost much of its force, mainly because the U.S. — Gaza to Greenland — no longer commands the moral authority it once assumed. Increasingly, when I hear it, it sounds less like analysis and more like reassurance. I know I’m not alone in this.

You can see this erosion in small but telling ways: in the growing reluctance to predict imminent collapse; in the uneasy acknowledgment that China is capable of building complex systems at scale; in the fact that younger audiences, and people closer to technology, manufacturing, or logistics, are less willing to treat China as a purely derivative or temporary phenomenon.

None of this amounts to endorsement. But it does suggest a loosening of reflexes.

A year of small shocks

The past year offered no shortage of moments that helped crystallize this shift.

The emergence of DeepSeek was only one of them. The reaction it provoked wasn’t really about a single large language model. It was about the dawning realization that China was not merely following at the technological frontier, but participating in shaping it. That realization sat awkwardly with long-standing assumptions about where innovation could — and could not — come from.

Then there was the strange but revealing episode of Western “TikTok refugees” making their way onto Xiaohongshu. Tens of thousands of users encountered a Chinese social media environment directly, without mediation by think tanks, policy papers, or cable news. The result wasn’t mass admiration so much as something more disarming: familiarity. China appeared less opaque, less exotic, and therefore harder to keep at a safe analytical distance. (In a strange coda to that episode a year on — not something I’ve looked into too closely, but from what I’m hearing — people are once again abandoning TikTok for Chinese apps, TikTok being under new and apparently very censorship-happy American management).

Around the same time, a steady trickle of firsthand accounts — from executives, engineers, investors, and travelers — described a China that didn’t fit neatly into prevailing narratives. Infrastructure that worked. Manufacturing ecosystems that functioned smoothly. A sense of momentum that was hard to reconcile with predictions of stagnation or decay.

Some of this material was shallow. A fair amount of the so-called “China-pilled” content circulating online is overwrought, unserious, or plainly wrong. I don’t endorse it. But even that excess is revealing. It suggests that people are groping, sometimes awkwardly, for ways to make sense of realities that just don’t fit the narrative they’ve been sold.

One of the stranger — and more amusing — expressions of this moment was described in a recent Wired piece by Zeyi Yang, who is always worth reading. Yang wrote about the sudden popularity of memes in which Americans announce that they are in “a very Chinese time” of their lives: drinking hot water (which I do endorse), wearing slippers in the house, posting videos of themselves eating dim sum, sporting vaguely Chinese-coded streetwear, or joking about “Chinamaxxing.”

The joke, as Yang notes, is not really about China, and certainly not about Chinese people. It’s a projection — a way of gesturing at something Americans feel they’ve lost.

The meme works precisely because it’s unserious. No one is actually becoming Chinese. But the impulse behind it is telling. China, in this memified version, functions less as a real place than as a symbolic contrast: a stand-in for competence, momentum, coherence, or simply “things getting done,” set against a backdrop of crumbling infrastructure, normalized dysfunction, and institutional paralysis at home.

That selectivity is the point. The meme is disposable, ironic, and easily reversed. It allows people to flirt with an alternative without committing to understanding it. In that sense, it’s less a sign of admiration than of dissatisfaction — a sideways commentary on American malaise, filtered through a half-ironic orientalist lens.

I wouldn’t read too much into it. But I wouldn’t dismiss it either. Cultural detritus often reflects shifts in mood before more formal discourse catches up.

The reckoning beneath the surface

This is where the connection to the “Great Reckoning” comes in — and where it’s easy to sound more portentous than necessary.

The reckoning I have in mind isn’t really about China. It’s about us. More specifically, it’s about a long-standing Western habit of assuming that modern outcomes — wealth, tech sophistication, state capacity — are inseparable from Western political forms. When things don’t line up that way, the tendency has been to assume something must be temporary, distorted, or unsustainable.

China’s rise has been awkward for that story. Not because it offers the West some appealing alternative model — I don’t think it does — but because it keeps producing results that are hard to dismiss without contortions. Over time, this has encouraged a set of coping strategies: predictions of imminent collapse, confident talk of inevitable convergence, and a habit of substituting moral judgment for careful description.

For a while, that worked. Or at least it postponed the need for a harder conversation...

That’s what I mean by the vibe shift. Not that people have settled on a new story, but that the old one is starting to creak loudly enough to be noticed.

In that sense, the shift is preparatory. It doesn’t tell us what to think next. It just makes it harder to keep thinking the same way.

by Kaiser Y. Kuo, Sinica | Read more:

Image: via

[ed. I've got nothing against China, it's just doing what any superpower would do, looking out for its interests, expanding its sphere of influence for economic and security reasons, and attempting to preserve its history, culture and political system. See also: The Civilization Trap (Sinica). And, in case you missed it, Why Everyone Is Suddenly in a ‘Very Chinese Time’ in Their Lives (Wired). Oh, and this: China's power grid investments to surge to record $574 billion in 2026-2030. Maybe people are just envious that China is investing in its future, while the US self-destructs and spends $ trillions on military weapons and war mongering.]

Clawed

How to Commit Corporate Murder

I.

A little more than a decade ago, I sat with my father and watched him die. Six months prior, he had been a vigorous man, stronger than I am today, faster and more resilient on a bike than most 20-somethings. Then one day he got heart surgery and he was never the same. His soul had been sucked out of him, the life gone from his eyes. He had moments of vivacity, when my father came back into his aging body, but these became rarer with time. His coherence faded, his voice grew quieter.

He spent those six months in and out of the hospital. And then on his last day he went into hospice. That day he barely uttered any words at all. In the final hours of his life, my father was practically already dead. He laid on the hospital bed. His breathing gradually slowed and became less audible. Eventually you could barely hear him at all, save for the eerie death rattle, a product of a body no longer able even to swallow. A body that cannot swallow also cannot eat or drink, and in that sense it has already thrown in the towel.

My mother and I exchanged knowing glances, but we never said the obvious nor asked any questions on both of our minds. We knew there would not be much longer. There was nothing to say or ask that would furnish any useful information; inquiry, at that stage, can only inflict pain.

I spoke with him, more than once, in private. I held his hand and tried to say goodbye. My mother came back into the room, and all three of us held hands. Eventually a machine declared with a long beep that he had crossed some line, though it was an invisible one for the humans in the room. My father died in the late afternoon of December 26, 2014.

A few days and eleven years later, on December 30, 2025, my son was born. I have watched death as it happens, and I have watched birth. What I learned is that neither are discrete events. They are both processes, things that unfold. Birth is a series of awakenings, and death is a series of sleepenings. My son will take years to be born, and my father took six months to die. Some people spend decades dying.

II.

At some point during my lifetime—I am not sure when—the American republic as we know it began to die. Like most natural deaths, the causes are numerous and interwoven. No one incident, emergency, attack, president, political party, law, idea, person, corporation, technology, mistake, betrayal, failure, misconception, or foreign adversary “caused” death to begin, though all those things and more contributed. I don’t know where we are in the death process, but I know we are in the hospice room. I’ve known it for a while, though I have sometimes been in denial, as all mourners are wont to do. I don’t like to talk about it; I am at the stage where talking about it usually only inflicts pain.

Unfortunately, however, I cannot carry out my job as a writer today with the level of analytic rigor you expect from me without acknowledging that we are sitting in hospice. It is increasingly difficult to honestly discuss the developments of frontier AI, and what kind of futures we should aim to build, without acknowledging our place at the deathbed of the republic as we know it. Except there is no convenient machine to decide for us that the patient has died. We just have to sit and watch.

Our republic has died and been reborn again more than once in America’s history. America has had multiple “foundings.” Perhaps we are on the verge of another rebirth of the American republic, another chapter in America’s continual reinvention of itself. I hope so. But it may be that we have no more virtue or wisdom to fuel such a founding, and that it is better to think of ourselves as transitioning gradually into an era of post-republic American statecraft and policymaking. I do not pretend to know.

I am now going to write about a skirmish between an AI company and the U.S. government. I don’t want to sound hyperbolic about it. The death I am describing has been going on for most of my life. The incident I am going to write about now took place last week, and it may even be halfway satisfyingly resolved within a day.

I am not saying this incident “caused” any sort of republican death, nor am I saying it “ushered in a new era.” If this event contributed anything, it simply made the ongoing death more obvious and less deniable for me personally. I consider the events of the last week a kind of death rattle of the old republic, the outward expression of a body that has thrown in the towel.

by Dean Ball, Hyperdimensional |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. More excerpts below. See also: Why the Pentagon Wants to Destroy Anthropic (NYT), Ezra Klein interviews Dean Ball (with a follow-up essay: The Future We Feared is Already Here). And, for a more comprehensive assessment of what the AI community thinks: Anthropic Officially, Arbitrarily and Capriciously Designated a Supply Chain Risk (DWAtV).]

***

"... Except the notion of “passing a law” is increasingly a joke in contemporary America. If you are serious about the outcome in question, “passing a law” is no longer Plan A; the dynamic is more like “well of course, one day, we’ll get a law passed, but since we actually care about doing this sometime soon, as opposed to in 15 years, we’ll accomplish our objective through [some other procedure or legal vehicle].” With this, governance has become more and more informal and ad hoc, power more dependent on the executive (whose incentive is to jam every goal he has through his existing power in as little time as possible, since he only has the length of his term guaranteed to him), and the policy vehicles in question more and more unsuited to the circumstances of their deployment, or the objectives they are being deployed to accomplish." [...]

... DoW insisted that the only reasonable path forward is for contracts to permit “all lawful use” (a simplistic notion not consistent with the common contractual restrictions discussed above), and has further threatened to designate Anthropic a supply chain risk. This is a power reserved exclusively for firms controlled by foreign adversary interests, such as Huawei, and usually means that the designated firm cannot be used by any military contractor in their fulfillment of any military contract.

War Secretary Pete Hegseth has gone even further, saying he would prevent all military contractors from having “any commercial relations” with Anthropic. He almost surely lacks this power, but a plain reading of this would suggest that Anthropic would not be able to use any cloud computing nor purchase chips of its own (since all relevant companies do business with the military), and that several of Anthropic’s largest investors (Nvidia, Google, and Amazon) would be forced to divest. Essentially, the United States Secretary of War announced his intention to commit corporate murder. The fact that his shot is unlikely to be lethal (only very bloody) does not change the message sent to every investor and corporation in America: do business on our terms, or we will end your business.

This strikes at a core principle of the American republic, one that has traditionally been especially dear to conservatives: private property. Suppose, for example, that the military approached Google and said “we would like to purchase individualized worldwide Google search data to do with whatever we want, and if you object, we will designate you a supply chain risk.” I don’t think they are going to do that, but there is no difference in principle between this and the message DoW is sending. There is no such thing as private property. If we need to use it for national security, we simply will. The government won’t quite “steal” it from you—they’ll compensate you—but you cannot set the terms, and you cannot simply exit from the transaction, lest you be deemed a “supply chain risk,” not to mention have the other litany of policy obstacles the government can throw at you.

This threat will now hover over anyone who does business with the government, not just in the sense that you may be deemed a supply chain risk but also in the sense that any piece of technology you use could be as well. Though Chinese AI providers like DeepSeek have not been labeled supply chain risks (yes, really; this government says Anthropic, an American company whose services it used in military strikes as recently as this past weekend, is more of a threat than a Chinese firm linked to the Chinese military), that implicit threat was always there.

***

[ed. One more thing. The guy who created this whole stupid dispute? Not Hegseth, he doesn't know shit about shit. It's former disgraced Uber manager: Emil Michael. A real piece of work (so of course, he fits right in.] 

Gone Girl

As I looked at Kristi Noem’s MAGA-fied visage plastered across the media on Thursday, along with the news that President Trump had fired her, I couldn’t help thinking: This was always going to end in tears.

Not because the defenestrated secretary of homeland security was uniquely bad at her job. Sure, “ICE Barbie,” as her critics dubbed her, was no paragon of competence. Her handling of ICE agents’ bloody rampage across Minneapolis was appalling — as, really, was her aggressive defense of the president’s entire deportation orgy. (That photo op field trip to the Salvadoran prison? Pure trash.) Her leadership style was, at best, chaotic. Her congressional testimony this week was defensive, dishonest, bumbling and self-contradictory. Her relentless self-promotion was embarrassing and more than a little foolish given who she works for. Rule No. 1 in Trumpworld: Never steal the spotlight from the boss.

Still, Ms. Noem was hardly the most incompetent, embarrassing or dangerous member of Mr. Trump’s cabinet. The competition is too steep.

No, I thought about how she owed her post to her laborious transformation into a particular kind of ultra-MAGA woman who kicks butt while always looking picture perfect — superfeminine and superaggressive — a role that comes with built-in challenges and limited room for error. The more furiously Ms. Noem contorted herself to fit this Trumpworld mold and catch the attention of the MAGA guys, the more she risked earning the contempt of the very people she wanted to impress, especially the president. Then, when she outlasted her usefulness, she was casually sloughed off.

Who could have predicted that one? Besides everyone.

Respect never seemed to be part of the equation with Mr. Trump and Ms. Noem. It’s hard to respect someone so eager to remake herself for your attention. Her physical MAGA makeover may be the most striking of any senior figure in Mr. Trump’s orbit. More disturbing was her scramble to prove herself the toughest cookie in the jar. [...]

It’s not hard to imagine why an ambitious woman might adopt an exaggerated, tough persona to fit in with a movement defined by chest thumping so heavy-handed it smells like misogyny. But Ms. Noem’s desperation to turn herself into a glambot enforcer was always just … sad.

It surely did nothing to help the secretary’s sense of self-worth that no one in the administration, much less the larger political world, took her seriously in her post. She was the face of an immigration policy that everyone assumed was being driven by the White House aide Stephen Miller and others, and presumably will continue to be.

But here’s where Ms. Noem really did herself in. With her high profile and her efforts to prove how hard-core she was — for instance, accusing the two Americans gunned down by immigration officials in Minneapolis of being domestic terrorists — she made herself a perfect scapegoat for the administration’s unpopular immigration agenda. No matter that some of her worst moments came as she tried to defend Mr. Trump’s morally indefensible policies. The president can now claim credit for firing a very bad employee, even as he and Mr. Miller continue promoting chaos and brutality.

It surely stings to be the first member of this cabinet to get the ax. Not Pete Hegseth? Pam Bondi? Lori Chavez-DeRemer? Robert F. Kennedy Jr.? But Ms. Noem can take solace in knowing she is not the first ambitious woman who tried to remake herself in the MAGA image only to be misused and ultimately discarded.

Elise Stefanik, a U.S. House member from New York, has traveled a similarly humiliating road. One of her party’s rising stars in the pre-Trump era, Ms. Stefanik followed the president down the dark MAGA path, visions of higher office dancing in her head. But time and again, she had her dreams sacrificed to Mr. Trump’s political needs — first her aborted nomination to the United Nations, then her aborted campaign for governor. She will leave the House at the end of this term with little to show for her self-debasement other than a reputation for shape shifting and sycophancy.

As Ms. Noem is finding out, it’s hard out there for a MAGA woman. You have to jump through trickier hoops than the men to get attention, but your efforts to please can work against you. The second your swaggering performance becomes a problem, the president kicks you to the curb. Just ask Marjorie Taylor Greene, who, after falling out with the president, fled the House and is now devoting herself to viciously critiquing his Iran policy.

Maybe Ms. Noem should consider a similar route, using her newfound freedom to tell the public how she really feels about what she was asked to do and defend in Mr. Trump’s name. She might even claw back some of that self-worth she gave up along the way.

by Michelle Cottle, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Damon Winter/NYT

[ed. Ouch... a political obituary for the ages. But still, just a triffle compared to the widespread misery she caused. One down, many more left: Hegseth and Miller especially.]

Shoddy People

America has been successfully invaded by an army of shoddiness. Our bones are gnawed upon by lazy rats. Even our pervasive sense of menace is shoddy in its approach.

The government has organized itself to please the King of Shoddiness, a man wholly concerned with spectacle to the exclusion of substance. The announcement of a program or action is all-important; what happens after that, no one cares. We watch federalism reshaped into the edifice of a casino, a swooping artifice of neon hung on a flimsy frame, fronting a blocky and neglected interior whose employees are rapidly losing interest in the customers.

The Secretary of Defense is a drunk newsman whose ideas for history’s most powerful military extend only to “increase your max bench,” and tail off from there. Likewise the FBI director, whose bug-eyed macho posturing evinces the desperation of a man trying not to think about the contempt in which his underlings hold him. The Attorney General’s primary qualification is the willingness to make loud declarative statements that are provably false while maintaining the serious visage of a television anchor. The Secretary of Homeland Security spends her time donning tactical gear and tossing around her inhuman ringlets while making videos for those with a Nazi propaganda kink. The Director of National Intelligence, a self-promoting political chameleon, has achieved the neat trick of being both incompetent and frozen out of power by other incompetents at the same time.

The Transportation Secretary, a former reality star whose official White House biography boasts that “Rachel and Sean are America’s first and longest-married reality TV couple,” is not even close to being the cabinet’s least qualified member. The Education Secretary and head of the Small Business Administration are just rich women seemingly assigned their positions at random. Others have, if such a thing is possible, negative qualifications. The Secretary of State landed his job by proving himself willing to adopt a posture of submission towards the man that he had tried and failed to cast as less manly than himself during the 2016 primaries. The Secretary of Health and Human Services is a certified loon, a classic dissolute child of privilege swirling into ever deeper cesspools of fringery, a former environmentalist transformed into a pesticide-boosting anti-vaxer, a man with no emotional or mental grounding in anything other than his determination to fulfill his destiny of poisoning the family name forever.

The Labor Secretary and her husband are both under investigation for different sex-related violations, simultaneously. The Vice President combs expensive lotions into his beard and practices taking the oath of office in his mirror at night, tears running down his lonesome face, dreaming of being able to hurt enough people to prove to his mother that he is worth something.

If these people were concerned with carrying out a coherent ideological mission they would be in trouble. They are not. Their small personal ambitions to have official titles and taxpayer-funded private planes occupy their small store of energy. For these baubles and modest perks they are happy to perform a gruesome pantomime of deference to a tacky know-nothing whose plastic skin droops further towards the gutter with each passing day. Embarrassing, one might think; but the smallness of all involved serves them well. They are too shallow to be filled with shame, overflowing as they already are with the yokel dazzle of a Price Is Right contestant who has just heard their name called, at last.

Propping up this leaky and flatulent balloon of misplaced careerism is an even more debased substructure of boosters who find satisfaction in the firm placement of a brown loafer on their collective carotid artery. A parallel world of media, which cultivates the appearance of news with none of its reality, exists to help prompt these political actors when they forget their lines. Awkward young white men in tight blue suits, their minds marinated for years in the virtual fascism of internet marginalia, find rewarding jobs as twitchy boosters of real world fascism for imaginary audiences of pale and insecure peers who never had anyone to urge them to read The Autobiography of Malcolm X. [...]

Saddest of all is “the base.” Base in class, base in emotion, regarded by those it supports in the same way they would regard any pedestal: A thing to stand upon in order to boost themselves, and then to promptly forget. The paltriness of this entire movement’s gestures at any version of substantial truth mean that it is impossible to be a genuine supporter without having an overwhelming amount of ignorance, delusion, or both. Bolstering the ranks of the purely deluded are the movement’s cynical supporters, aware of its bullshit but willing to overlook it due to a traumatic belief that nothing really matters. This layer of unhappy and unsuccessful con men lurk about in grudging respect for the more successful con men they see in charge. These are the angry small business owners with violent daydreams, the wheedling would-be hustlers trying to take advantage of modest and clumsy bribes, the Mar-a-Lago ghosts who haunt suburban Fort Lauderdale McMansions, clutching cheaply framed photos of themselves posing with the president in a holiday party receiving line. This coalition of the doomed lines the road to perdition, grasping for any crumbs that might fall to them, forsaking all earthly pleasures other than hypnotism.

What defines our seedy era is not its dishonesty, which has always been the government’s baseline orientation, but rather the pointed lack of concern for covering that dishonesty up. The well-crafted lies have given way to careless ones. The conspiracies all fester in plain sight. The payoffs and the quid pro quos are conducted casually. The motivation to appear more just than they really are has left the ruling class. In its place is an odd sort of affinity for tawdriness, a newfound respect for disgrace. If everyone abandons all pretense at telling the truth all at once, well, the pressure’s off, isn’t it?

by Hamilton Nolan, How Things Work |  Read more:

Image: Getty

[ed. Yep. When your principle political philosophy is just 'owning the libs', and blindly following your leader's every zig and zag you're just a clown hiding under a flag. How's that working out? See also: Remove Your Ring Camera With a Claw Hammer (HTW):]

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Do you have a Ring (TM) or similar video camera by your front door? With the curved end of a claw hammer, deliver a sharp downward stroke to the device’s top edge. Think of the blow as a slicing or chopping motion. When the unit is severed from your doorway, place it in the trash.

For stubbornly attached units, you can also use the flat side of the hammer in a straight-on strike, repeated until the item is rendered into a pile of splinters that can be swept up using an everyday broom and dustpan.

Some say this approach to your Ring camera is wasteful. This is true. It would have been more efficient never to install this device at all. But perhaps you moved into a home that already has one. Or perhaps you were momentarily afflicted with an episode of irrational terror, which has now passed. Either way you need to get the thing off. Whatever waste is produced is, at this point, unavoidable.

Others say that this action is destructive. This is an error. What is destructive is the insidious belief that the world outside your front door is to be treated with suspicion; that every passerby is a potential threat; that every neighbor is a potential enemy; that every human interaction must be stored and cataloged as evidence of possible crime. This attitude is destructive of good will, of brotherhood, of peace, of love. This is the attitude of the Gestapo. This is the attitude of the paranoid lunatic. This is totalitarianism creeping into your home disguised as safety.

One swift stroke of that claw hammer will fix all that.

...what if someone steals your Amazon package off your front steps? Well, what if they do? I guess you would have to get a refund. I guess you might suffer an extremely minor inconvenience. I guess it could be an opportunity to reflect on the painful predations of poverty under capitalism, which creates economic desires, renders people unable to satisfy them, and then taunts them with constant visions of abundance in which they cannot share. True, it is a tragedy of unimaginably small proportions that someone has stolen your box of paper towels. Would you let them steal your optimism, as well?